When Are Statistical Forecast Gains Economically Relevant? Evidence From Bitcoin Returns
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT We study how statistical forecast gains for Bitcoin translate into trading profits. Using real‐time out‐of‐sample forecasts from daily bivariate VARs from October 2021 to February 2024, we show that Bitcoin returns are forecastable and that seven predictive indices yield significant gains in directional accuracy (DA). However, mean‐squared forecast error is largely uninformative, and mean DA alone is insufficient to explain trading profitability. To understand this puzzle, we introduce a conditional DA measure based on the magnitude of price movements and a threshold‐based trading strategy. Profits arise only when DA remains stable during large market swings. Mean DA obscures breakdowns precisely when accurate forecasts are most valuable. Under a formal excess‐profitability test, the USD index and the Shanghai Stock Exchange deliver statistically significant profits, challenging the efficient market hypothesis.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it